Terrorism and Islam are not race!!

So how come the TSA refuses to profile passengers based on their religious affiliation or ties to terrorist groups? I don't recall hearing about any Baptists committing any terrorist acts. I'm sorry but there is a strong correlation between a person's religion and their likelihood to commit terrorist acts. I know you have all read the e-mail where it lists all the terrorist attacks from Munich, 1972, to Beirut, 1983, to New York, 2001, and how they were all committed by Muslim males between the ages of 16-60.

So, why are we ignoring the obvious? I plan on writing Senators Allen and Warner and Representative Moran and asking why. Now, that the ineffectual and pathetic Norman Mineta has resigned as the Secretary of Transportation, whose whole policy towards securing our airlines was clouded by his experience as a Japanese-American internee during WWII, surely we can do better.

I fly - a lot. And I am mad as a hornet that I can't bring toothpaste or cologne or Cherry Coke on the damn plane. Before every trip, I stop at the same newsstand and buy four magazines (Computer Gaming World, PC Gamer, Maximum PC, and The Atlantic monthly), a king-size Kit Kat and 2 Cherry Cokes (one for the plane ride because stupid United "features" Pepsi - yecch! - and one for after I arrive at my destination).

Only now I can't do that because some of some malcontent, British-Pakistani Muslims. Great!

Before I sign off, I ask you to consider a larger question: do Muslims, as a group, get along with anyone? I mean, is there one country where Muslims co-exist as part of a multi-cultural society? Look at the US after 9/11. Muslims make up about 2-3% of the Muslim population. And yet after America was attacked, they were bleating about a backlash (which never materialized) against Arabs in America. That's chutzpah, folks!

The parallels are obvious

Check out this article from Oregon Live. It's an article about a 36 year-old mother of two who is about to lose her job as a classroom aide because of a silly law that says that people who commit certain crimes can't work in Oregon's school systems.

The article starts out by relating a story from 1963 about a 17 year-old who ran a stop sign, hit another car and accidentally killed a high school classmate. The driver of the vehicle was none other than our First Lady, Laura Bush. The article tells the reader that although Ms. Bush could have been charged with vehicular manslaughter, she wasn't, and hence was able to go on and lead a productive life.

The article is trying to draw a parallel between the case of Mrs. Bush and that of the subject of the article, Kieya Walker. When Walker was 17 she shot and killed her boyfriend while he was sleeping. She was subsequently charged with and convicted of murder.

Of course! I mean, the parallels are obvious and huge.

Now, one is perfectly free to argue that a law that says that people convicted of certain crimes can't work in the school system is unjust and should be changed. And the fact that Walker has truly changed her life and become an upstanding citizen is certainly laudable. But to suggest there is a parallel between an auto accident that results in a death and murder is specious, if not subversive, logic.

Then again, isn't that the kind of reporting we've come to expect from the media?

Pet Peeve #147

This has nothing to do with any of the normal stuff that I usually write about. It's just one of the many things that pisses me off.

Like people that try to get on the elevator before letting others get off. Or people that stand in doorways. Or people that won't get the hell out of the left lane.

So, what I want to know is, when did lemons in my soda become mandatory? Now, every time I'm in a restaurant - and this includes the restaurants here in Maputo - I have to fish out a damn lemon out of my Diet Coke. A lemon that I didn't want in the first place and now is going to waste.

Now I have to remember to ask the waiter to hold the damn lemon. Great!

How's this for gratitude?

I ran across this item on the Internet.

Sooooo. The United States goes into a war zone and evacuates a bunch of U.S. citizens (most of whom were "dual-citizens"). Then, eschewing normal procedure, the Department of State waived the fees that they charge for evacuating U.S. citizen.

Why? To pander to the mythical "Arab street", of course.

Now, I would argue that one could have reasonably predicted that some form of military violence was likely to occur in Lebanon (considering that the country has been experiencing some form of conflict for approximately the last 32 years). In other words, those Americans were there by their own choice, mired in a situation that was totally predictable. Yet we didn't charge them for the evacuation. This is unlike the situation last year in Asia when we evacuated U.S. citizens from areas that were hit by the tsunami - a phenomenon that is much less predictable than the Hezbollah-provoked destruction that rained down on Lebanon.

And what do we get for this effort? A lawsuit.

That's right, folks. The American-Arab Discrimination Committee is suing Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, charging that they mismanaged the evacuation efforts.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Nina Chahine, 19, who with her family was among the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said her wedding in the southern city of Tyre was set for July 13.

The wedding had to be postponed as family members fled the outbreak of the war, she said.

"We were on the road and the first bridge was bombed and we drove home and all the other bridges were bombed and there was absolutely no way for us to get home," Chahine told reporters outside federal court in Detroit.

"We were all American citizens and there was no way that anybody helped us. No communications nothing. I was on my way to my wedding fearing death, basically."

Chahine said her immediate family spent about $20,000 to return to Detroit via Syria and Jordan.

Dear Nina,

Here's a tip: Don't get married in countries that house illegal militias that attack other countries and hence are likely to come under counter-attack!

Crap like this sure makes me want to rush right out and rescue people from dilemmas of their own making.

PLEASE don't tell Ma!

I know I mostly use this space to vent my spleen on how Democrats and liberals are screwing up the world, but I DO have a sense of humor (honest!). Here's an item I found VERY funny.

(Once again I am cribbing from my hero, James Taranto. But he gets paid to find these things, while I have to catch-as-catch-can in between NIV training sessions and server migrations.)

Prosecutors say a 29-year-old man traveling with his mother desperately did not want her to know he had packed a sexual aid for their trip to Turkey.

So he told security it was a bomb, officials said.

Madin Azad Amin was stopped by officials on Aug. 16 after guards found an object in his baggage that resembled a grenade, prosecutors said.

When officers asked him to identify it, Amin said it was a bomb, said Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Lorraine Scaduto.

He later told officials he lied about the item because his mother was nearby and he did not want her to hear that it was part of a penis pump, Scaduto said.

Write your Congressman today!

Today I was reading online about the illegal immigration cause celebre: Elvira Arellano. A quick Google search will tell you that Ms. Arellano is an illegal immigrant who is currently holed up in the Aldalberto United Methodist Church in Chicago, Illinois. She has been granted "sanctuary" by the congregation's pastor, Walter Coleman.

The pro-illegal immigration lobby is hoping that her case will attract national attention and sympathy for the [self-imposed] "plight" of illegal aliens. Really, though, there is nothing special about her case. She entered the U.S. illegally in 1997 and was deported shortly thereafter. Within days of being deported, she again entered the U.S. illegally. In 2002, she was convicted of working under a false Social Security number and ordered to attend a second deportation hearing. Shock of all shockers, Ms. Arellano failed to appear at her hearing. Of course, like many other illegals she had a child in the United States.

This brings me to the point of this post - PLEASE WRITE YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES AND URGE THEM TO CLOSE THE EGREGIOUS LOOPHOLE THAT GIVES CITIZENSHIP TO THE CHILDREN OF PEOPLE IN THE U.S. ILLEGALLY!!! This loophole is an affront to our respect for the law.

In Arellano's case, she is using the fact that her son is an American citizen as leverage to gain sympathy so that she can be rewarded for breaking the law. First, there is no law that says that she can't take her son and raise him in Mexico. Second, she is claiming that her son has health problems that require him to stay in the United States. What are these "health problems"? She claims that her son has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and severe separation anxiety. So, let me see if I understand this: her son is a normal, rambunctious 7 year-old who misses his Mommy.

This is just offensive to me. I wrote Senator George Allen, Senator John Warner and Representative Jim Moran and urged them to introduce or support legislation that closes this loophole.

If you want to be my friend, you start by knocking on my door - not breaking into my house!

A picture is worth a thousand words

This picture pretty much sums up the difference between the IDF and Hezbollah.

Qana, a.k.a. Jenin Redux

Remember the "Jenin massacre"? In April 2002 Israel was accused of wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank town of Jenin. Breathless news accounts reported hundreds dead ("martryed") at the hands of the IDF.

However, as it turns out the Jenin massacre wasn't exactly a massacre. A United Nations investigation of the "massacre" reported that the actual number of Palestinians killed was 52. Of those, 22 were civilians. On the other side, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed.

The IDF suffered a relatively high number of casualties because they ordered house-to-house clearing of the neighborhoods where Palestinian fighters were hiding. And, the Palestinians likely wouldn't have suffered 22 civilian casualties if their "soldiers" didn't insist on using civilians as human shields.

Fast-forward to 2006 and replace the name "Jenin" with the name "Qana". It's the same incident all over again. The Arabs triumphantly proclaim, "Massacre!!" It's a "Gotcha" moment - almost as if the Arabs are glad the Israelis killed their civilians. And, yet, rather than take a few days and investigate, the usual suspects (Reuters, BBC, The New York Times) parrot the
Arab claims.

I'm sorry but this sort of one-sided treatment only hurts Israel. The Arab groups that are trying to destroy Israel don't care about human life. This should hardly be a sensational claim given that the Arabs resort to human shields and suicide bombers.

It's the soft bigotry of low expectations. We don't really expect civilized behavior from Arab terrorists, but our media scream like bloody murder when our side mistakenly kills even one innocent civilian. Not a peep when some terrorist bombs innocent civilians and tortures and kills our soldiers. It doesn't really hurt Hezbollah, Iran or Syria to get this kind of negative press - and it's rarely truly negative. It's usually more like "bending-over-backwards- to-be-neutral". It helps them and hurts Israel to have page one, above-the-fold headlines screaming, "Israeli Massacre". And the average news consumer can be forgiven for missing the three-line, page 28 "Correction" that says, "Ooops. Sorry. There was no massacre."

I urge you to do some more reading on Qana. It already looks as if there may have been hours difference between the Israeli strike and the explosion that brought down the building. And, surprise, surprise, the body count is actually turning out to be lower than was initially claimed.

There's a great example of this behavior in the excellent Spielberg film, "Munich". In one scene, an Israeli cabinet minister proclaims that the post-Munich hit teams are un-necessary because the Israeli Air Force had already hit back by bombing the Palestinian camps in the Bekaa Valley. "At least 60 dead," he says. Later, when one of the assassins is "interviewing" the Fatah representative in Paris, he claims that the Israelis bombed refugee camps, killing "at least 200".

Why do we continue to give the benefit of the doubt to the enemy?

Agenda in Ads?

Sometimes I think I am one of the few people that watches advertisements closely and critically. For at least ten years I have been saying (although not on these pixels) that the people that create advertisements in this country have a liberal agenda. Over the next two or three days, do a little, informal experiment. See how many times you notice the following things:

• Fathers are optional.
  
• Men, and especially white men, are portrayed like idiots (when they are portrayed at all).
  
• When showing groups of more than three people who are not family, it is always a mixed race group (except when it is a group comprised exclusively of minorites, which seems to be permissible).
• Minorities are presented in disproportional numbers.
• Really young boys have to have cool, "punk-rock" hair-styles. (This doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the blog. It just pisses me off.)
  

You can interpret these trends however you like. Me, I happen to have a bit of a problem with the first two, and no problem with the second two. I'll explain why in a minute. First I want to tell you about the ad that I just saw.

This is the first time I've seen this spot; I have no idea how long it has been running. The ad is for the Ford Freestyle Crossover sport utility vehicle. It shows a seemingly happy family. Dad, Mom (Mom is driving - I am watching a replay of this on TiVO as I describe the ad and I didn't notice this the first time), two kids (one of each, natch ) and a dog. They are obviously on a weekend outing. They stop at a fruit stand. Parents are bonding with children. They arrive at the beach. Then the drive home. Pulling into the driveway. Home, sweet home! Then the ad cuts to Dad taking out bags from the back of the Freestyle (500 miles on a tank of gas!).

Wait, what's this? Dad is hugging little sis, and there, blurry and indistinct but undeniably there, is Mom still behind the wheel. Cut to shot of Dad hugging both kids.

"Thanks for inviting me this weekend."

"Sure."

"All right, guys. I'll see you next week."

"Bye, Dad."

Cue graphic: BOLD reaches out. Voice over: "Bold moves. They happen every day."

This ad, to me, gets to the heart of one of the things that popular entertainment has lost: its aspirational mission.

Sure, when we watch old movies today, they seem corny. There's no foul language. No sex or nudity. Barely any kissing. No drug use. No violence or gore. It's not as if the writers, directors, producers and actors of the day didn't know about such things. Of course, they did. Many of them lived lurid off-screen lives. But they also seemed to feel an obligation to provide better fare.

Critics will argue that such entertainment doesn't "keep it real" (O how I loathe that phrase!). I would argue, so what? What's so great about "real"? Real is coarse and harsh. Real doesn't inspire you to be better. Sure, brutal and harsh entertainment can remind you of the behavior to which you can aspire, but that's negative reinforcement. Heroin is bad. I get it. You won't catch me watching Requiem for a Dream twice (my burning love for Jennifer Connelly notwithstanding - I fell for her hard in Labryinth).

I wouldn't be surprised if, when the Clios (the Oscars of advertisements) roll around, this ad were nominated. I can just imagine some breathy critic proclaiming it's "daring" and how it shows a family that looks more like an American family of 2006.

That's all well and good. Really. It is. But what's so bad about entertainment that reminds us that we can be and do better?

The travesty that is Hamdam v. Rumsfeld

Another thing I have been meaning to comment on was the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision handed down by the Supreme Court. There have been plenty of legal analysts who have commented on the details of the opinion and the correctness of the decision. Obviously I don't have the same level of expertise so I am going to comment in a more general way.

Hamdan has already had some disastrous effects, chief among them being the Pentagon's decision to extend the Geneva Convention's Common Article 3 protections to illegal combatants. The experience of the farcical Moussaoui trial should have been warning enough to the Bush administration and the Pentagon as to the unsuitability of treating terrorism as a law enforcement problem.

That trial took four years and cost many millions of taxpayer dollars and the result was that we couldn't even sentence to death a person who, by his own admission, wanted to fly a jet into some structure full of people and was trying to achieve that end. And, why was his life spared? His father was abusive. And some people in France treated him badly because of his race. And, so for that, the American taxpayers can pay to feed and clothe him for the rest of his life. Wonderful.

(As an aside, I will just state that I don't think Moussaoui was the "20th hijacker". I think he was a wanna-be and a stooge and executing him would have granted him his fervent desire to become a martyr. That being said, I can understand and sympathize with the desire to execute him.)

And, now the Pentagon, rather than interpreting the decision as narrowly as possible has ruled that these illegal combatants are entitled to many of the same protections as our soldiers.

A point that I have tried to make in the past about the Bush administration is this: they can't repeat can't win over their critics. No matter how hard the Bush administration tries (see No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drug benefit, out of control federal spending), they get crucified for it anyway. How much goodwill have these kinds of policies won them from the Krugmans and Dowds and the MoveOn.org crowd? None. Zilch. Zip. Why not govern your principles and slough off the rhetorical slings and arrows?

I don't know why not. I do know that our enemies are not stupid and these kind of decisions are what emboldened them to attack us in the first place. Combine the Hamdan decision with the equally misguided McCain anti-torture amendment and one can see that we are rapidly painting ourselves into a corner in which we will find that our forces are hamstrung in their ability to find, fix and kill the enemy, while the enemy will find himself free to commit any and all atrocities.

Think about it: every day you hear and read stories about an enemy that targets women and children and there is little or no outrage. Conversely, some terrorist cretin gets a hangnail and there are hundreds of stories and editorials decrying the American "evil empire". This is the same attitude which has clouded the reporting on the Israeli incursion into Lebanon and it's despicable.

Well at least she's at the right school

On this blog, I crib from the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal's Best of the Web. I try not to do it too much, but some things are just too priceless to let pass.

Like this example. Taranto excerpts a few lines from a poem that a graduate student at UC-Berkeley wrote. Now, this woman's love poem to Hezbullah is bad enough. However, more than making up for her frightening poetry is the rebuttal poem from blogger "Iowahawk". Read on:

Hezbollah Groupie

One Cecilia Lucas, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, has penned a "love poem for Hizbullah." We kid you not. Here's a sample:

You were born out of death to a life in a cage
Where bombs are not the only reason people die
Fed by the violence of hunger and homelessness
Raised by colonialism
Your heart and your will still grew strong

You scare me
Not just because they tell me to be scared
Not just because they repeat, repeat, repeat
The story of 1983
Begging me to understand
Americans are worth more than Lebanese

We suppose a certain romanticization of nihilistic political violence is a common enough form of adolescent rebellion, though one suspects young Miss Lucas is getting egged on by her professors, many of whom no doubt are liberal baby boomers who never outgrew their own adolescence.

Ah well, the best way to respond to this sort of thing is with mockery, as blogger "Iowahawk," writing under the nom de plume "Omar Walid Muhammed, Chairman, Hezbollah Poetry Club," devastatingly does, in a poem called "I Love You Too, Cecilia Lucas":

You were born in the Valley to a life in a suburban cage
Encino, where mean girls and cheerleaders
Drop bombs of hate on the unpopular girls
Shy poetry club chicks like you
With 1480 SATs and early admission to Berkeley
Fed by the violence and lookism of the dance squad
Raised in a four bedroom colonial
They wouldn't let you wear your Che T-shirt to prom
But your heart and your armpit hair still grew proud and strong

You scare me too
Not just because you have that Code Pink Manson girl freak-vibe
Not just because you repeat, repeat, repeat
All those quotes from your dog-eared volumes of Chomsky
and Zinn
and Edward Said
Begging me to understand
Can't we just hold each other
Instead of talking, talking, talking
About your Masters thesis?

Benefit of the Doubt?

While I was in Libya, there were a lot of "stories" in the news about the "massacre" in Haditha, Iraq. For those of you who have spent the last six months in a cave, Haditha is a city in the al Anbar province in eastern Iraq. U.S. Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Division, are accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in an apparent reprisal for the killing of a Marine by a roadside IED.

As I read these stories, and the related stories about the torture and killings of Privates Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker. A rather obvious question occurred to me. In fact, it was so obvious that I wondered that I hadn't asked it before.

Why does our media give the terrorists the benefit of the doubt?

Think about it: the overwhelming majority of our men and women in uniform behave with admirable restraint and are good ambassadors of our country. On those rare occasions when members of our armed services commit crimes it's our own military that uncovers the abuse and prosecutes the offenders. (Think Abu Ghraib.) Either that, or the press uncovers the wrongdoing and the military then prosecutes the accused. (Think My Lai.)

The terrorists on the other hand can be - and are - characterized by their lack of restraint. They target civilians. They use hospitals, schools and mosques to hide fighters and store weapons, essentially turning their populace into human shields. Rather than treat captives humanely, they torture and murder them. In short, they inflict terror.

It seems pretty obvious to me that our fighting forces are the mirror image of theirs. Let's face it: if we wanted to go in and murder, rape and pillage, we could. But we haven't. Part of the credit for that goes to the restraining influence of the Fourth Estate. Part, but not all. A large part of the credit goes to the culture of the services themselves.

And in the Abu Ghraib and Haditha cases there seems to be an almost "Gotcha!" attitude. As if the reporters couldn't wait to pounce on the accusations of malfeasance by our military.

Oh, and lest we forget, even soldiers and Marines are entitled to a presumption of innocence.

Long time, no blog, Pt. II

Wow! I can't believe it's been three months since I've written anything. I go through peaks and valleys with the blogging thing. Some months I get on hot streaks and will jam out several posts a day. Lately, I've been in a valley.

For some reason I always feel compelled to post an update on what I have been doing in the interim (as if that is some kind of excuse). The truth is sometimes I get disheartened because I don't have very many readers and a lot of the times I think, "Why bother?"

And as I look back at my last "Long time, no blog" post, I can see that I already kind of recently did the "what-have-I-been-up-to" thing so I'll try to keep this short. Then I will get back to the real business of explaining how Democrites and liberals are ruining the world for the rest of us decent folk.

I spent almost all of May in Vietnam. It was a welcome respite from Saudi Arabia. I didn't really get out of Saigon. I basically just relaxed, shopped and enjoyed the pho and cheap massages.

After that I was home for about two weeks before my next assignment - Tripoli, Libya. Libya was pretty interesting in a challenging sort of way. I went there with another colleague to install the systems needed to process visas and American citizen services, and to train the staff to use the software and hardware. Unfortunately, my colleague developed a really bad cases of hives our second day there and she ended up leaving two days later. That left me with a lot of work to do and very little time to do it.

So what started as a two week trip turned into a four week trip. I worked most of the time since the embassy is located in the same hotel where I was staying. I did manage to get out and see some of the city. One Saturday, I did hire a car and went to ruins of Leptis Magna. Leptis Magna was the largest city the Romans founded in Africa. The ruins are large and very well preserved. Most of the statues and figures have been defaced but a lot of the inscriptions are still legible. There is also a very large ampitheater and several fora. It reminded me of the Roman ruins outside of Amman that we visited while we lived in Jordan in the 1980s.

Tripoli didn't make that much of a lasting impression on me. It reminded me a lot of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (not a good thing). It was really hot (regularly above 100 F) but not as humid. Similar to Jeddah and Beirut, it has a long Corniche (ocean-front road). I did trek out to one of the beaches in town to collect some sand for my roommate Jamie's father (who is a former Marine).

Tripoli reminded me of Saudi Arabia in other ways, too. For example, there is the prohibition against alcohol and the near ban on almost all forms of public entertainment. Most Libyan women wear the abaya and nijab (the head scarf and veil that together make up the hijab) but it is not required as in Saudi Arabia. Also, unlike Saudi Arabia, women are allowed to drive.

Where Libya differs from Saudi Arabia is in the socialist character of the government. Muammar Qadafi (mostly just called "the Leader") is essentially a Nasserite (i.e. a Pan-Arab socialist). He calls Libya the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya". Jamahiriya is an Arabic word that translates into "state of the masses". The word derives from the fact that Qaddafi claims Libya is a "direct democracy" governed by the people through local councils.

More properly, Libya is a Soviet- type "cult of personality" similar to what I saw in Turkmenistan. Everywhere you go there are posters and billboards celebrating the Leader. Last month, most of the signs seemed to be celebrating the Leader's 36th year in power. (I would have thought that he would have waited for a milestone year, but I guess he probably celebrates every year in power.)

After I had been there for three weeks I started hanging out with one of the guys that works in the Consular Section. Ali is a Libyan who grew up in Egypt. He is a commercial pilot by training but is understandably having trouble getting employment in the wake of 9/11. What I found is that in Libya, like Saudi Arabia, there is fun to be had you just have to know somebody. We went out to a birthday party of a friend of his one night and drank Libyan moonshine. I don't know what it was made from, but it tasted like aguardiente or venado or some other clear white liquor. Not a strong taste and you can mix it with anything.

He also took me to a place called al Hufra. It's a series of restaurants co-located with the fish market. What you do is stroll among the fish stalls and select your fish for dinner. Then you tell the guy which restaurant you are eating in and they bring your fish to you. It was very good and, as you might imagine, very fresh.

I got home from Libya on July 12th which almost brings us up to the present. Since I've been back I have been getting geared up to move (again). I just found out that I am assigned to go to Recife in September so I am going to get married at the end of the trip. After that I will be in Hamburg in October.

Capitol Hill Follies

If Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D.-GA) had any sense of class or decency (and the evidence suggests that she doesn't), she'd send a bottle of champagne to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D.-RI). Ok, maybe not champagne. Maybe a nice fruit basket.

McKinney is the cretin who accused the Capitol Hill Police of being racists for trying to enforce the rules. McKinney tried to bypass a metal detector - which she's allowed to do, provided she's wearing the pin which idenitifies her as a member of Congress, which she wasn't. When a police officer tried to stop her, she assaulted him and then held press conference after press conference claiming the incident was racially motivated.

Well, in a way, she's right. Like most of her generation of black "leaders", McKinney plays the race card every chance she gets. When her party was outmaneuvered in Georgia and her district gerrymandered to where Democrats were the minority, she claimed it was based on race. It couldn't have had anything to do with the fact that earlier, during her first stint in Congress, right after the 9/11 attacks, she accused President Bush of complicity in the worst attack ever on U.S. soil. Naahhhh. Had to be "whitey". McKinney suffers from "Carpenter's Syndrome". When you're a member of the racial grievance industry....

Lucky for her, Ted Kennedy's son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy came along to bump her out of the news cycle. What a piece of work this guy is! Early Thursday morning (about 2:45 a.m.), Kennedy slammed his car into a Capitol Hill Police barricade at the corner of First and C Street. He staggered from his car claiming to be late for a vote even though the House had been closed for hours. Capitol Hill Police wanted to perform field sobriety tests, but their supervisor ordered them all to leave the scene. Then the supervisor drove Kennedy home!

Kennedy claims he wasn't drinking. A waitress at a nearby bar, the Hawk & Dove, says otherwise. So do the Capitol Hill Police officers on the scene. They thought Kennedy was drunk and wanted to give him a sobriety test. Only their boss decided it was his duty to play chauffeur to this privileged git.

Where to begin? How about at the beginning? I mean, you have to feel a little sorry for this guy since the deck was stacked against him from birth. His parents are Joan and Ted "Manslaughtering Cheater" Kennedy. Talk about being pre-disposed to alcoholism! It would be a minor miracle if he weren't a booze hound.

Now, Patrick Kennedy is 39 years old - basically my age. In 1987, while a student at Providence College (what's the matter? had Harvard already met their quota for Kennedys?) he did a stint in rehab for cocaine abuse. Do the math - he was 20! He has since developed a reputation for a guy who uses his famous name and office to get special treatment. There's video tape of him from three years ago trying to avoid an airport security checkpoint. When confronted, he berates and shoves the checkpoint attendant - a woman. Whatta guy! Earlier this year he was involved in another auto accident in his home district where he was apparently speeding through a parking lot.

Kennedy claims that he has a problem with prescription medication. He has wrapped himself in the victim's mantle and has checked himself into rehab. I would ask if he has a sense of shame, but knowing he is the son of Ted Kennedy, the question's rhetorical.

Now, if you or I crashed a car into a police barricade and staggered out reeking of booze, there's likely nothing we could do to avoid a field test. This would be followed by a night in jail, a date in court, a court-ordered alcohol education program, substantial fines, increased insurance premiums, and restricted driving privileges.

Not little Patrick Kennedy. Instead, he's going to get a six-week vacation and a date on the Oprah Winfrey show.

The Kennedy clan have gone from being "American royalty" to the Jackson family of politics and we have descended into a full-scale celebritocracy.

Where is the outrage?

Long time, no blog

Greetings, loyal readers! (Or reader, as the case may be.) It's been about two months since I vented my spleen about the state of the world. Since I am easing back into this, I thought I'd catch everyone up on what's been going on these last eight weeks.

I last blogged from Tirana, Albania. I was there for work, as usual. Frankly, Albania ain't much too look at, but I was glad to get the assignment again since my brother and sister-in-law are there. I should amend my earlier statement. Tirana isn't much to look at. I'll bet there is plenty of beautiful Balkan countryside in Albania, I just didn't get to see it. If you are ever considering traveling to that part of the world, I recommend not going there in February. It wasn't particularly cold, but it rained nearly the whole time we were there (almost three weeks).

After Albania, I spent the rest of March stateside crawling the walls, waiting for my next trip. Luckily my next trip was a vacation to Brazil. I took my Mom down to Recife to meet my girlfriend, Ana Maria Bezerra Sales. I also delivered an engagement ring to Ana making her my fiancee. We spent four days in Brazil and had a really good time. I also took the Foreign Service Written Exam (the first step towards becoming a Foreign Service Officer) at the U.S. Consulate there. I was sorry to leave Brazil and Ana but my next trip beckoned.

I'm writing to you from my next destination, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This is my fourth trip to Jeddah. I have to confess: I pretty much loathe Saudi Arabia. It's hot and dusty and no fun at all.

What's to like? Not much. For starters, what infuriates me the most is how the Saudis subjugate their women. I mean, can you imagine living in the 120 degree heat of the desert and having to wear a long, black dress and a black headscarf when out in public? It's nigh on cruel and unusual punishment. Frankly I think the men here know that they don't have what it takes to truly love and please a woman and so they subordinate them. I gotta hand it to them, though. They've brainwashed the women into thinking it's for their own good, while the men walk around in their long, white dresses.

Your average Saudi doesn't work - at least not much. For that they have all manners of foreigners. From Americans and Europeans to perform the skilled labor (lawyers, engineers, doctors) to Pakistanis and Bengalis to do all the menial labor (domestic servants, food service, sanitation). They are obsequious towards the former and condescending, bigoted and cruel towards the latter. Again a reflection of their so-called "manhood".

You have to time when you go out for a meal because they close all the shops during prayer time. I would have much more respect for the Saudis and their puritannical culture if I didn't know it was rank hypocrisy. I mean, I would respect their piety if they all, or at least a significant number of them, stopped to pray during prayer time. But they don't.

As for the prohibition on alcohol, that's looked at with a wink and a nod. Everyone knows that in the homes of the rich and powerful and the royals, alcohol is consumed. In fact, it's rumored that it is the royals who are largely responsible for what traffic there is in drugs and alcohol in the Kingdom. And they are well-known party people as soon as they set foot outside the Kingdom.

In all, I highly recommend that you NEVER come to Saudi Arabia, if you can at all help it. Stick to Brazil. Better food, better weather, better women.

Luckily I am getting out of this gilded hell-hole tomorrow night. I fly from Jeddah to Kuala Lumpur to Ho Chi Minh City. I was there in 2004 and had a great time. I can't wait to get there. I'll write you once I get settled in.

Wow, that's big of him!

Check out this from EFE news (a Spanish news agency) reported March 6:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will seek a constitutional amendment to extend his presidency until 2031 should opposition parties boycott the Dec. 3 presidential election, Chavez said in his weekly radio and television address March 5 that the United States was orchestrating the potential opposition boycott in an effort to undermine his presidency. The Dec. 3 election is the last one in which Chavez can legally participate under current laws.

I must say that it is remarkably magnanimous of Chavez to only ask for a twenty-five year extension to his presidency, as I would have expected him to press for a presidency-for-life.

Of course, given that Chavez is 52, a twenty-five year extension is pretty much the same thing. And who's to say that if he lives to be 77, Chavez won't push for yet another extension?

Don't hold your breath, Mahmoud

Posted without comment.

The International Atomic Energy Agency must compensate Iran for damaging its development by suspending its nuclear activities, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said March 7.

Ouch!

Check out this item from the Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel. I think in this case even I might be inclined to sue. Whoo-boy!

One sharp cookie

Check out this letter to the editor of delawareonline.com from one Bradley Lehman of Hockessin, DE. The letter is not very long, so please give it a read.

Mr. Lehamn is just 17 years old. This is one bright kid. He sees very clearly what so many in the United States, blinded and unhinged by their hatred of President Bush, do not.

As the old saying goes...

...you can't make this stuff up!

The New York Times has a lengthy article on what they call "mixed-orientation" marriages. The first few paragraphs explain what the phenomena is. Paragraphs four and five cite some statistics that seem to try and convince the reader that this phenomenon of gay men (or, as the Times calls them, "men who have sex with men") married to women isn't as rare as the reader might first think.

Paragraphs six, seven and eight try to give some historical context, citing some famous gay men, past and present, who have been married to women. These are only anecdotal and hardly indicative of some burgeoning national trend. In paragraph nine, however, they do acknowledge that anything resembling exact numbers just aren't available.

They then quote a research anthropologist from Rutgers University, Helen Fisher, who says that, "human partnerships are shaped by three independent neurochemical brain-body systems, responsible respectively for sexual attraction, romantic yearning and long-term attachment." Ms. Fisher (I assume she does not hold a Ph.D. else the Times would have referred to her as Dr.) tells the reader that these "three independent systems help explain why people can be wildly sexually attracted to those they have no romantic interest in, and romantically drawn to — or permanently attached to — people who hold no sexual interest."

The article then continues on with a discussion of whether or not women who enter such relationships are truly deceived or if they are, in fact, deceiving themselves. They also cite what statistics are available on the success or failure of such marriages.

I have to admit, the article is pretty even-handed. It does attempt to show both sides while not condemning such unions. This is more than I expected from the Gray Lady.

But the real shocker is how the Times chooses to end the article. They finish with a look at one such "mixed-orientation" marriage. The last five paragraphs informs the reader of the marriage of Paulette and Jerry Cormack from (where else?) California (sorry, Nick!).

First let me invoke another old saying: "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt." Here's how the Times describes Mrs. Cormack's view of her "marriage":

For 34 years, Mrs. Cormack said in an interview, she has known that although she and her husband are sexually active together, his erotic desires otherwise focus almost exclusively on men. "It's not easy, but I truly do love him," Mrs. Cormack said.

As if that weren't pathetic enough (pathetic in the sense that Mrs. Cormack is deserving of sympathy) here's the last paragraph of the article:

He added: "I am totally committed on all levels to Paulette. I felt so intimate with her when I was caring for her during her cancer treatments — to me, that's a stronger expression of love than whether I'm having anonymous sex with a man." (emphasis added)

How can I possibly expound on such an extraordinary attitude?

Crap as an appetizer

This is what passes for rational commentary and persuasive speech from the Left in Oregon (but I repeat myself).

Voters selected this menu

After having been force-fed a steady diet of terrorist teriyaki in 2004, fearful Americans re-enthroned a delusional White House chef de cuisine who believes that he has a divine mandate to jam his recipe for theocracy down the nation's throat.

Consequently, a five-star evangelical eatery has its tables set for a battle between Planned Parenthood and the state of South Dakota. This fundamentalist food court is called Chez Scalitomas. And anti-choice members of its staff are now preparing the Lord's supper at One First Street NE in Washington, D.C.

For carnivores, the reactionary restaurant's road kill menu may soon feature eviscerated Roe vs. Wade served on a tasty bed of freshly slaughtered stare decisis. Vegans may be offered a delightful Garden of Eden salad topped with a heavenly creationist dressing intelligently designed by cordon bleu Bible-thumpers.

Voters asked for this born-again carte du jour. Now the meal they ordered from it is about to be served. Bon appetit!

What I don't understand is why a reputable newspaper would print such tripe. It's not even very clever. It contains all the usual tropes mouthed by the Left. It's certainly not original.

So, let's carve this turkey!

First you have the use of the word "enthroned", as if Bush were some kind of unlawful or illegitimate ruler. Bill Clinton served two terms and never once garnered more than 50% of the vote. Was he "enthroned", too?

Then is the mandatory claim that America is going to become a theocracy. Well, which is it, crunchy? Is he a monarch or a mullah? I won't even pretend to understand what the next paragraph is all about. The author seems to be saying that the theocratic lackeys of George Bush on the Supreme Court (only two of whom were appointed by him) are going to overturn Roe v. Wade. Well, so what if they do? Then what will happened is what should have happened before the disastrous Roe ruling was handed down. The people might actually get to decide if abortion should be legal.

What I don't get is the fact that, despite all the overblown rhetoric about rulers being enthroned and theocratic takeovers of society and democracy and its institutions being sacrificed, the author contradicts all his own breathless pronouncements in the title and the second-to-last sentence. " Voters asked for this born-again carte du jour." Yes, they did. Get over it.

Muslim Hyper-sensitivity

Check out this article from OregonLive.com. It details the reaction by Muslim students at Oregon State University to a column about "cartoon-gate" by an OSU junior named Nathaneal Blake.

The colum, entitled "The Islamic Double Standard", accuses Muslims of demanding a double-standard of sensitivity for their beliefs while extending little to others' beliefs. The reason for the Western media's indulging of this double standard, according to Blake, is that "[b]luntly put, we expect Muslims to behave barbarously".

This touched off the expected student protests and hyperbolic sound bites like this one from the OSU Muslim Student Association's vice president, Nada Mohamed:

Tears were flowing out of my eyes as I was reading [the column]. I felt like somebody was ripping my heart out.

I've commented myself on the double standard demanded by Muslims and won't rehash those arguments here.

What I wanted to draw your attention to was this item on the second page of the article on OregonLive.com:

[OSU Daily Barometer editor DD Bixby] said editors have been checking copy with Muslim students, and on Tuesday deleted one paragraph from a piece scheduled to be published the next day

What's that? The Daily Barometer appears to have accepted some kind of "Muslim sensitivity" editorial review board that is striking items from stories slated to be published in its pages. Haven't these people heard of a little thing we in America like to call the First Amendment?

Lunacy!

Oscar Picks Revisited

I was pleasantly surprised to wake up this morning and find that I wasn't living in a "Brokeback World". I couldn't have been happier to go 2-for-5 in my Oscar picks.

I both pleased and hugely surprised that "Crash" picked up the Best Picture award. It really is a fine, thought-provoking, well-acted drama.

I don't think Clooney or Rachel Weisz deserved their Best Support Oscars, but those are traditionally the categories where the Academy is allowed to screw up (the Marisa Tomei rule). I think with Clooney was the sense, "Look, the guy is taking his charm and clout and trying to use them to do serious work that will provoke real conversations about topics without being a Sean Penn or a Sarandon/Robbins - polarizing figures - so let's reward him." I thought Syriana was really mediocre, but remember Clooney was nominated three times last night, so I think the sense was he had to win something.

I think the same could be said of Ang Lee and "Brokeback Mountain". "Mountain" was nominated for 8 Oscars but only won three. The Academy has to award it something, otherwise why was it so heavily nominated in the first place?

I thought "The Constant Gardener" was a long, boring mess of a movie and didn't really think anything about it was Oscar-worthy. In it, you take a member of an acceptable modern-day "bad guy" group - drug companies - and pit them against the plucky, "you-can't-tame-me-you-stodgy-British-diplomats" wife/heroine and stir. The story is like "Syriana" but for drug companies. Such characterization and demonization of drug companies is too facile by half.

You go, boyyyy!

A hearty congratulations to new Chief Justice John Roberts. Not only did the Roberts Court side with the defendant, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in the case Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), but Roberts was able to do so unanimously. Not only were there no dissents, there weren't even any separate concurrences.

As such, it was a huge rebuke to the academy. The academy, in this case 36 law schools, filed suit against the DoD protesting that the Solomon Amenment (which provides for forfeiture of certain federal monies if the institution in question does not permit military recruiters the same access to students as other employers) was a violation of their right to free speech and free association.

It seems that the shrinking violets at these law schools just couldn't bear to be associated with the military and their [congressionally-mandated] "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Now, the obvious solution is the one that Chief Justice Roberts asked during oral arguments. If the law schools had a problem with the military and its policies, why not just not take the money?

But that was unthinkable to the law schools. Cynically, they insisted on a right to suckle at the federal teat, with none of the responsibilities (as if it were beyond the power of Congress to attach conditions to receiving federal funds). This would certainly be news to the states, who have had to lower the threshold for driving while intoxicated and the legal drinking age in order to keep receiving federal funds for maintenance of highways.

Roberts and Co. smacked the law schools down, 8-0. (Justice Alito, who was not on the bench during oral arguments, was prohibited from deciding the case.) Way to go!

And, yet there is another aspect to this case that has gone unexamined as far as I can tell. It is this: why wasn't FAIR suing the Congress? Maybe you can't and that's why. But if you can sue the DoD, why not Congress?

In any case, if the law schools represented by FAIR had a problem with the Solomon Amendment, why not take it up with Congress?

Come on! You know the answer as well as I do. Objecting to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy was a pretext. The law schools were looking for a reason to deny military recruiters access to their students and they thought they had found it.

Does anybody really think that anyone would have conflated the law schools allowing military recruiters on campus with support for the military in general, or this policy in particular? Do the law schools allow RJ Reynolds and Phillip Morris to recruit on their campuses? Do you think anyone thinks that the nation's elite law schools support the tobacco companies? Of course not. The idea is ridiculous.

Many elite schools already deny ROTC access to campus and have since long before "don't ask, don't tell". (Trying to allow ROTC back on campus at Harvard was one of the disputes outgoing president Lawrence Summers was having with his petulant faculty.) This is just an extension of that policy. "Don't ask, don't tell" was merely the straw at which they grasped to do so.

For Pete's Sake!

Check out this article.

Will someone please tell me why U.S. taxpayers are going to pay to rebuild a mosque that our troops didn't destroy (and presumably would have prevented from being destroyed had they been given the opportunity)?

Why don't we round up the Sunnis who blew the thing up and garnish their wages or freeze their assests, to be used to rebuild the mosque? Why doesn't some enterprising Iraqi approach al-Jazeera about broadcasting a telethon a la Jerry Lewis to raise money to rebuild the mosque?

Haven't we helped Iraq enough without paying for all the damage wrought by the insurgents?

The Opposite of Assimilation

For me, this story from the Chicago Tribune captures exactly one of the problems with immigration.

In this story the reader is told of the travails of Bridgeview's Universal School girls basketball team. What is the problem, you ask? The Universal School is a private school for Muslims. As such, the girls who attend it wear the long, flowing robe (called a jilbab) and headscarf (the hijab) that some seem to think Islam requires. Such garb is worn to promote modesty, which in and of itself, especially in this day and age of Brittany Spears and bared mid-riffs, isn't a bad thing.

(Never mind for a moment that it turns the idea of self-restraint on its head. This uniform for Muslim women serves a dual purpose. It also serves to keep the women from tempting the men. In the 100+ degree heat of Saudi Arabia, I have always found this stricture exceedingly cruel. The men are allowed to go out in their sun-reflecting white thobe, while the women must wear the all-black - and heat-absorbing - abbaya. I always think the same thing, "Why not ask the men to exercise a little self-control instead of enshrouding the women in what surely must be the most uncomfortable garb one could have devised for the desert heat?")

What is a bad thing is what the Universal School is considering demanding of its prospective opponents. In order to play basketball, the girls must, perforce, doff their long robes and headscarves. Horrified at the idea that male spectators would be able to see the bare arms and legs of 15-, 16- and 17-year old girls, the Universal School has decided that it must bar male spectators from the girls' games. This, in and of itself, would not be a problem if similarly-minded opponents abounded. The rub is that they don't. In the Chicago area there are only four other such schools.

Obviously this would make for a very short season. Or a very dull one, facing off against the same competition four or five times each season. So, Universal School would like to play some public school competition. Not a bad idea, you say.

The problem is that would-be opponents "would have to agree to bar men and boys above the age of puberty from watching the games". This means that no fathers and not many brothers would be allowed to watch their favorite young hoopsters play. It would also deprive the opponents of much of their fan support. Not to mention the small fact that many public schools' girls basketball teams are coached by men.

According to the Tribune article, this "dilemma underscores the balancing act many Muslims perform as they toggle between American and Middle Eastern culture".

Yes, it does. And at least one member of the Universal School girls' hoops team has the right idea. "I don't want to have to impose our religious requirements on anyone else," Farhat Siddiqi says. Yet Ms. Siddiqi seems to be in the minority among her minority.

Apparently the Universal School has considered and rejected as impractical the idea of having the girls play in sweat pants and head scarves. Still, in reading the article, they seem unwilling to make any further concessions towards the larger majority. What's wrong with the modest concession of allowing the girls play in short-sleeved jerseys and knee-length shorts like those favored by basketball players from high school through the NBA?

All of this is my long-winded way of underscoring one of the things that is wrong with immigration today. Instead of immigrating to America and embracing our culture while preserving parts of their own, modern-day immigrants seem intent on moving to America and recreating, in toto, their native cultures.

Yet in the elites' imposition of total obeisance to diversity, must we now bar fathers and brothers from watching their daughters and sisters play basketball so as to not offend the hyper-sensitivity of a small segment of our population? What's wrong with a few concessions from the minority?

Fundamental Misunderstanding of Economics

Check out this item from BBC:

The military chief of Nigeria's Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta declared "total war" Feb. 17 against all foreign oil interests in southern Nigeria. In an interview with The British Broadcasting Corp., Maj. Gen. Godswill Tamuno issued an ultimatum to all oil companies to leave the area by midnight Feb. 17. The group's "Dark February" campaign is aimed at stopping foreign exploitation of the region's resources, he said.

If I had been interviewing MG Tamuno, I think the follow up question I would have asked would have gone something like this:

"Well, if foreign oil interests don't exploit these resources, who will?"

What I think the General fails to grasp is that leaving all that oil in the ground doesn't benefit anyone. The Nigerians can derive economic benefit by allowing foreign oil companies to export the Niger Delta's oil reserves. The fact that the revenues from such exporting hasn't benefited the people of southern Nigeria is something MG Tamuno should take up with Abuja, not the oil companies.

France - what a joke

Responding to accusations that the French are working to overthrow Bashar Al-Assad, a French Foreign Ministry spokesman said, "Paris only wants Lebanon to fully recover its sovereignty in accordance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559."

Oh. So now the French care about enforcing U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Where were they when the U.S. was trying to enforce U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441?

Quick Hitter about Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program

Are you ready for a real howler? Iranian Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said that the Iranian nuclear program isn't a threat because "...Iran's religious beliefs prevent it from developing nuclear weapons."

Oscar Picks

I have a long history of disagreeing with the Academy dating back to 1994 when "Forrest Gump" won Best Picture over "The Shawshank Redemption". I could go on about the terrible injustices meted out by the Academy (e.g., "Titanic" over "L.A. Confidential") but won't.

Instead I am going to list my predictions for the "Big Five" awards along with who I think ought to win. Here goes:

Best Picture: "Brokeback Mountain" - It has all the buzz and momentum and has already entered the American lexicon.
My Pick: "Walk the Line" - This is a movie that normal folk can relate to which makes it unsuitable to the Academy. It doesn't flatter the Academy's intellectual vanity.

Best Director: Ang Lee, "Brokeback Mountain" - Again, big Mo' for "Brokeback" will carry Lee along with it.
My Pick: Steven Spielberg, "Munich" - I'm afraid the excellent morality tale will end up being shut out.

Best Actor: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, "Capote" - Again, he has all the momentum going in and the depiction of supreme egotist Capote flatters the Academy's intellectual vanity.
My Pick: Joaquin Phoenix, "Walk the Line" - For the same reason that "Walk the Line" won't win Best Picture, Phoenix will not win the Actor's trophy.

Best Actress: Felicity Huffman, "Transamerica" - Has anyone outside NY, LA and the Academy even seen this movie? Yet lauding movies about homosexuals and transsexuals makes the Academy feel more enlightened than "Red State" America.
My Pick: Reese Witherspoon, "Walk the Line" - For the same reasons Phoenix will not win Best Actor, Witherspoon will not win Best Actress.

Best Supporting Actor: Matt Dillon, "Crash" - This excellent, intricate story of race relations in California will probably not pick up nearly as many awards as it deserves. Dillon is their best shot.
My Pick: Matt Dillon, "Crash" - "Crash" should win more Oscars than "Brokeback Mountain". I mean, really. How relevant are gay cowboys in America? Especially compared to race relations.

Best Supporting Actress: Catherine Keener, "Capote" - Keener is a great actress in the same mold as previous Supporting Actress winner, Marcia Gay Harden. This pick will help stoke the Academy's sense of moral righteousness.
My Pick: Catherine Keener, "Capote" - She's just a great actress.

I'll check back after the awards and see how I did. Lord knows, I hope I am wrong on some of these.

You hit me and I'm going to hit...that guy over there!

Israeli newspaper Haaretz had this report:

Iran will respond to a U.S. attack with a military strike against Israel's main nuclear facility, an Iranian adviser to the Revolutionary Guard said, Haaretz reported Feb. 24. The adviser said the Iranian retaliation against Israeli targets would also focus on Haifa, which houses several chemical factories and oil refineries, and Zakhariya, where an Israeli missile base is located.

Now, in the twisted mental machinations which pass for logic in the Arab world, this might make sense. Except that experience should tell the Iranians they don't want any part of the Israelis. Even when outnumbered and outgunned, the Israelis have mopped up the floor with the Arabs in every stand-up fight they've had with them.

As I write this and think about it, it must just be rhetoric for the masses. The Iranians can't be that stupid, can they?

Most Under-rated Iraqi?

There's an influential figure in Iraq who gets very little media attention. He is not part of the government yet he easily could have been. When others are fanning the flames of sectarian divisions he consistently calls for restraint, cooperation, compromise and dialogue between Sunnis and Shias.

He is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and, although he is Iranian by birth, he is the senior and most respected Shia cleric in Iraq. Quite simply he is one of that remarkable and all-too-rare breed that we call a "statesman".

On the eve of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, he issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling on Iraqis not to resist the occupation forces. Shortly after the American occupation began, Sistani issued fatwas calling on Shia clergy not to get involved in politics. He worked with firebrand Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to agree on a common slate of Shia candidates in the Jan. 30, 2005 elections.

He is a nearly unabashed supporter of democracy in Iraq. He supported the formation of a constitutional convention, and later demanded a direct vote for the purpose of forming a transitional government (perhaps seeing this as a sure path to Shiite dominance over Iraq's government, since most observers say that Shiites make up about 60% of Iraq's population). Subsequently, Sistani has criticized American plans for an Iraqi government as not being democratic enough (!).

In the aftermath of the February 22nd bombing of the Al-Askariyah Shrine in As Samarra, he called for seven days of mourning and restraint against attacks on Sunni mosques.

In my opinion, he is a truly remarkable man and one can only hope that there are many more like him waiting in the wings of the Shia community in Iraq.

Down with the U.S.?

Check out the following report from Agence Presse-France:

About 15,000 Shiites in the town of Budgam in Indian-controlled Kashmir protested the bombing of the Golden Mosque, a Shiite shrine in As Samarra, Iraq, Agence Presse-France reported Feb. 23. The protesters reportedly chanted "down with the U.S." and "death to the enemies of Islam."

What the heck does the United States have to do with this? I think one thing most everyone can, or should be able to, agree on: neither the U.S. nor its armed forces bombed this mosque. In fact, in all likelihood it was a member of that well-known "religion of peace", Islam. Proof again that no good deed goes unpunished.

Consistency from the Left? Pt. 6

A recurring theme of this blog is hypocrisy. I choose to pick on the political Left because I disagree with so many of their positions and because, well, it's just so darned easy.

Take Sen. Charles Schumer (please!), who now says he would take Halliburton (that's Democrat shorthand for "evil oil company") over Dubai Ports World to manage those six American ports.

So, let me get this straight: it's not okay to racially profile Muslims in order to stop terrorism, but it is okay to racially profile entire companies because they are based in Muslim countries?

A few facts, if you have a moment:

1. These ports were already foreign-owned and managed. They were being managed by a company called Peninsula and Orient Steam Navigation Company (P&O), a British firm that was acquired by Dubai Ports World. US approval was needed, sought and obtained for the takover since P&O managed several important East Coast ports.
   
2. If the U.S hadn't allowed the takeover of P&O by Dubai Ports World, management of these ports would most likely have been ceded to a Singapore-based firm. So it's not like All-American Port Management lost out in a crooked process to some icky Arabs.
3. Security at the ports will still be the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Coast Guard. Labor will still be provided by the International Longshoreman's Association.
   

This is not to say that there aren't honest objections to be made over the deal. Port security is important and potientially very vulnerable to attack. As Charles Krauthammer noted in an excellent op-ed, managing these ports will necessarily entail turning over details of port security to whichever firm manages the ports. If that firm is foreign-owned, the federal government (both the legislative and executive branches) should look very carefully at the fine print.

But, why bother with nuanced analysis when you can resort to good ole fashioned demagoguery, right Chuck?

Quick Hitter about the UN

Recently UN Secretary General Kofi ("I fiddled while Kigali burned") Annan called on the US to close its detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

I say we make Kofi a counter offer: we'll close Guantanamo and let all those nice terrorists go home if you close up Turtle Bay and send all those nice globo-crats home. Deal?

"Misguided Border Patrolling"

A week or two ago I read an op-ed in USA Today written by a Ruben Navarette, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune.

In it, Mr. Navarette blames everybody for the illegal immigration problem: local, state and federal authorities, politicians, businesses and ordinary citizens. Everybody that is except for the illegal immigrants themselves. As if the USA were some kind of powerful magnet that illegals are helpless to resist.

He advocates a "three strikes" law, saying that current laws are too lax because they contain a loophole (one has to "knowingly" hire an illegal immigrant). Well, aren't the illegal immigrants "knowingly" breaking the law? (Of course, Mr. Navarette convienently omits the adjective illegal, preferring simply to refer to them as immigrants.)

He's correct that the government, especially the federal government, has failed in its responsibility to enforce current immigration laws. Yet he doesn't suggest any kind of guest worker program. Such a failure wilfully ignores the security implications of our long, undefended border with Mexico.

My own position is that we should change the law. I favor a guest worker program similar to what they have in many Gulf states and Japan. Such workers are welcome to stay as long as they have a job. However, once their employment is up, they must return to their native country. I don't believe that each and every resident alien should be placed on a citizenship track. We've got 300 million people. We don't need an undefined number more, thanks.

(By the way, for those keeping score at home, this was my 150th post.)

I just want to get the rules straight

I'm a big gamer and a fairly competitive person. I like playing card games, board games, computer games. Games of all sorts. I think one of the thinks I like about games is that they have rules. I like to understand the rules so that I can play the game.

So let me see if I have the rules on this straight.

Muslims can kidnap and behead infidels (their term, not mine) and then release the videos on the internet. They can riot and kill people because of an erroneous story about the abuse of the Koran. They can riot and attack foreign embassies and consulates. They can kill our soldiers and their own countrymen through the use of cowardly tactics such as the use of IEDs. They can execute police trainees. They can strap bombs to teenagers so that they can kill innocent victims in discos and shooping malls and on buses and themselves.

And we can be more sensitive to their concerns.

Is that about right?

This is base hypocrisy. The Muslim world insists that the rest of the world respect their religion while they respect no religion other than their own. Ever hear of a concept called dhimmitude? It's a concept whereby Islam relegates all non-Muslims (i.e., infidels) to second class status, including special taxes and abridged rights. In Saudi Arabia, for example, it is illegal to practice any religion other than Islam. Muslims demand tolerance from the West for their religion, but rarely grant it in their own countries.

And since the impetus for this post is the flap over the cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper (in September, mind you!), how can we overlook the anti-Semitism rampant in the Muslim media. Jews are regularly depicted in crude caricatures (hook-nosed, greedy, duplicitous). Egypt, for example, recently ran a forty-one part (!!) series based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". It purports to be the master plan by which Jews take over the world, but has long ago been proven to be a Russian czarist forgery. Except in the Muslim world, where they lap it up with a spoon.

Let me say this plainly: NOTHING TRUMPS FREE SPEECH. NOTHING! Not religious sensitivity (or over-sensitivity, as the case may be). Not gender issues. Not racial issues. Not sexual orientation issues. Nothing.

I could give a fig about Muslim sensitivities. And really that is what we are talking about. No-one is suggesting to the Muslims that they be sensitive to Jewish sensibilities. No-one is saying that the media in America should be sensitive to Christian sensibilities. Do you know why? Because when you print a cartoon that is offensive to Jews or Christians, they don't go on multinational rampages. I'm sorry but no citizenry has the right not to be offended.

I hope the delicious irony of this whole flap hasn't escaped anybody: Muslims are rioting, rampaging, and attacking embassies and businesses (a KFC in Pakistan - take that, Colonel Sanders!), burning Danish, French and American flags, calling for the deaths of the cartoonists - to protest a cartoon that suggested that Islam has been co-opted by violent factions!!

The protests in Pakistan and the Philippines are particularly risible since once the protests are over many of the same people will be standing in line for visas to Denmark, France and the US.

Finally, the kicker: THERE IS NO PROHIBITION ON THE DEPICTION OF MUHAMMED IN THE KORAN! It's a fact. You can look it up. In fact, there used to be a tradition of depicting the prophet and using satire as protest in the Muslim world. My, how far they have retreated.

Imagine the reaction if the opposite happened

Read the article that can be found at this link.

Now, I ask you to imagine the rhetoric that would be forthcoming from Mexican President Vicente Fox if armed U.S. soldiers or Border Patrol agents had crossed the U.S.-Mexican border illegally.

This seems like a pretty serious problem. As the article says, many corrupt Mexican authorities might be crossing our borders in the aid and abettance of alien and drug smuggling. Who knows when they might start accepting money to smuggle terrorists across our border?

I need to investigate this a little more. According to the article there have been many such incursions by Mexican authorities over the last ten years. Perhaps we do the same and the Mexicans turn a blind eye.

If I find that to be the case, I will post a retraction.

My Day with the Rwandan Genocide

Today I visited two sites that are memorials to the Rwandan genocide that took place between April 3 and July 4, 1994.

I hired a taxi driven by a delightful and friendly fellow named Valence (pronounced Va-lonce). He was recommended to me by the consular officer with whom we are working here in Kigali. Valence didn’t speak much English, so we conversed in French. I was pleased to find that my French isn’t as rusty as I thought. On the drive both to and from Nyamata we had quite a free ranging conversation. We talked of the genocide, the future of Rwanda, and the problems facing Rwanda, and Africa in general. We even talked about women and the virtues of marriage and family.

The first site I visited was a Catholic church in the town of Nyamata. Nyamata is southeast about an hour by car from Kigali. In 1994, about 10,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus took refuge in the church there. About another 10 – 15,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus took refuge in the grounds and environs of the church.

To put it simply, they were slaughtered there. Some were shot. Some were killed when grenades were lobbed into the church. Some were hacked to death with machetes. Some were clubbed to death. Most gruesomely, infants were killed by being flung against the walls of the church.

Inside the church, the first room you enter contains the clothing of many of the victims. It also contained large bags of bones. I noticed that some of these bones were contained in USAID food donation sacks.

In the nave of the church, there are a few coffins for the pitifully few victims that were able to be identified by surviving family members. Most of the victims are interred in mass graves beneath the church itself and in two mass graves constructed on the grounds behind the church. To put it mildly, to see graves like this is overwhelming.

After visiting Nyamata, we returned to Kigali and went to the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Gisozi. This is a memorial dedicated to both the Rwandan genocide and all genocides that have occurred in modern history. Its purpose is to document these atrocities and educate visitors on the various genocides. The memorial is quite well done and obviously very sobering. It’s also surprisingly high-tech with numerous touch screen LCDs. When you start the video clips on the LCDs, it shows video accounts of survivors from different genocides. The memorial was paid for with donations from numerous NGOs and humanitarian organizations, Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in western Jerusalem), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International among them.

I learned quite a bit about the history of Rwanda and the ethnic strife that led to the genocide. For example, while I knew the Rwanda was a Belgian colony that gained its independence in 1962, I hadn’t known that from 1895 – 1923 Rwanda was a German colony. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in WWI, the Belgians were granted a mandate over Rwanda by the League of Nations.

I also learned quite a bit about the ethnic divisions which led to the genocide. For example, when the Germans colonized Rwanda there were basically eighteen clans in the colony. The three main ethnic groups that are commonly recognized today (Hutu, Tutsi and Twa) were imposed by the Belgians to denote socio-economic status. If you owned more than ten cows, you were a Tutsi.

So, strictly speaking Hutus and Tutsis aren’t really ethnic groups at all. This was something that my driver explained to me. The driver explained to me that it wasn’t like the difference between, say, Nigerians and Ethiopians, who are strikingly different in appearance. While there are some subtle differences in the physiognomies of Hutus and Tutsis, the differences aren’t as clear cut as in the example I gave earlier in the paragraph.

The designation of Hutu or Tutsi or Twa denoted how wealthy or influential you were in your clan - and social mobility was possible. In other words, if you somehow worked your way up to owning ten or more cows, you could go from being a Hutu to a Tutsi.

This was rare, however, and since allied clans would naturally work together and favor one another, the clan identity gradually gave way to the ethnic identities of Hutu and Tutsi. (Twas are the smallest group, and as near as I could tell didn’t figure in the genocide.) As the Tutsis were the wealthy, they were a minority. And since they were wealthy they were favored by the Belgians. Thus, they maintained their economic status and began to become more educated. Because they were more educated, they gradually came to dominate the civil service under colonization. This is what led to the Hutu resentment of the Tutsis.

The memorial went into great detail about how the timeline of the genocide but it’s much too detailed for me to go into here.

For me the most powerful and most disturbing portion of the exhibit was the one dedicated to the child victims of the Rwandan genocide. It featured pictures of a child killed during the genocide; some short facts about the child (favorite food, favorite subject in school); and how they were killed. Again, mere words can’t really capture the power of this portion of the memorial.

I’ve posted pictures of my visit to these memorials on Kodakgallery.com. Normally, I send out a mass e-mail to all my friends and family inviting them to view my photos. But due to the disturbing nature of the photos from Nyamata, I am not going to do that this time. Instead, I will send an e-mail to everyone. Anyone that wants to see this album can e-mail me back and I will send an invitation to view the album.

Consistency from the Left? Pt. 5

This has been a drum I've been beating particularly hard for the last couple of weeks because it really gets my goat.

In a speech at Princeton University, Senator Hillary Clinton said, “I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and to outsource the negotiations.”

Now, this is really rich. When it came to Iraq, the President acted "unilaterally" (despite the fact that 30-some nations joined our coalition) and against the wishes of the UN (despite UN Security Council Resolution 1441) in his "rush to war" (despite the fact that the invasion of Iraq was the most telegraphed invasion since Desert Storm in 1991).

Yet, when it comes to the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear weapons program, she critcizes the President for acting with the EU-3 (France, Germany and the UK - which includes two of the three countries which did the most to obstruct a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq). I don't suppose that, since the nascent Iranian nuclear weapons program most directly threatens Israel, this has anything to do with the fact that Senator Clinton represents New York, a state with a large and influential Jewish population, does it?

Do I really need to write any more?

Just a few items from the New York Times

In the January 20th edition of The New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney makes at least one factual error and then quotes Howard Dean which for the 47th quintillionth time demonstrates the chutzpah of the American left.

First, Nagourney writes, "...and it came at a time that Mr. Rove himself is under investigation for his role in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer to reporters." This is an important factual error that Nagourney makes because it speaks as to whether or not a crime was even committed in the Valerie Plame kerfluffle.

Valerie Plame was not undercover when her identity was revelead. This is not "inside baseball". This is the crux of the matter. First of all, columnist Robert Novak did not reveal her name. He revealed that a CIA employee had a hand in getting Joseph Wilson the assignment to assess whether or not Iraq had tried to procure Nigerien "yellowcake" uranium. And, despite Wilson's denials, it has now been proven that his wife did, in fact, have a hand in his being selected for the mission.

Now, Valerie Plame had, at one time, been an undercover operative for the CIA. But, as Joseph Wilson's own book proves, she hadn't been in the field since 1997. In that case, there was no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

The chutzpah part comes when Nagourney quotes Howard Dean, "'The truth is, Karl Rove breached our national security for partisan gain and that is both unpatriotic and wrong.'" I wonder if Howard Dean has ever heard of Sandy Berger.

Consistency from the Left, Pt. 4

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been raking the American political left over the coals for their lack of consistency. But, I've decided that I have been unfair. They are consistent in one aspect: their insistence on a double-standard for Republicans.

Take, for example, their high dudgeon over the NSA wire-tapping scandal, when it was Bill Clinton that authorized Echelon, the largest electronic surveillance program in history.

Or how about this from the great Power Line blog?

So, let me see if I get this straight: if you divulge information that is helpful to Democrats you are a "whistle-blower", a "patriot", and sometimes even a Person of the Year (as FBI Special Agent Colleen Rowley was in 2002, along with World Com Vice President Cynthia Cooper and Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins).

But if you divulge information harmful to the Democrats you are, at least according to the New York Times, "someone...who wanted his criticism of the Clinton administration to be known". In other words, as blogger John Hindraker from Power Line puts it, "just a partisan with an axe to grind".

Hindraker also notes that "after the Times has printed dozens (hundreds, probably) of stories critical of the Bush administration based on leaks by Democratic bureaucrats, we're still waiting for the paper to write: 'A copy of the report was obtained by The New York Times from someone sympathetic to the Democrats' position who wanted his criticism of the Bush administration to be known.'"

James Taranto: My hero!

Check out this item from Taranto's Best of the Web from January 5th, 2006:

From a Harris Poll on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court:

Opposition to the confirmation of Judge Alito would probably grow substantially if most people believed he would vote to make abortion illegal. A 69 to 31 percent majority of the public say they would oppose his confirmation if they thought he would vote to make abortion illegal. Majorities of Democrats (86%) and Independents (74%) feel this way. However, a majority of Republicans (56% vs. 44%) would support his confirmation if they believed he would vote to make abortion illegal.

Yeah, well, we would oppose Alito's confirmation if we believed he would vote to make abortion illegal--and we think Roe v. Wade is a monstrosity. Reversing Roe, however, would not make abortion illegal; it would merely make it possible for duly elected legislators to do so. The guys who write Harris polls know so little about constitutional law, they ought to be teaching it at the University of Virginia.

(I promise I did not read this before my post on liberals' misunderstanding of the principle of federalism.)

Chutzpah, they name is Ted Kennedy

I've been on record many times that Ted Kennedy is the most shameless and hypocritical politician in the United States.

Check out what Sen. Kennedy had to say about the current hearings on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court:

Mr. Kennedy said that the nomination process, and particularly the hearings, had "turned into a political campaign," and that the White House had proved increasingly skilled in turning that to its advantage.

"These issues are so sophisticated--half the Senate didn't know what the unitary presidency was, let alone the people of Boston," he said, referring to one of the legal theories that was a focus of the hearings. "I'm sure we could have done better."

"But what has happened is that this has turned into a political campaign," he said. "The whole process has become so politicized that I think the American people walk away more confused about the way these people stand."

Where to begin? First of all, a nomination of any kind is not a political campaign. Perhaps all Ted Kennedy's heavy drinking has so addled his brain that he has forgotten that it is the political campaign that leads to the nomination. In other words, you win an election and you get to nominate people you want for various positions.

Secondly, the nerve of such a statement from the man who turned the surname "Bork" into a verb is...stunning doesn't even begin to come close. I quite literally can't think of a way to characterize this strongly enough.

Consistency from the Left, pt. 3

It was Bill Clinton who signed the law authorizing the creation of special prosecutors. He then spent his entire presidency dodging and demonizing them. It was President Bush and the Republican Congress that allowed the law to sunset.

So, of course, Al Gore is now calling for a special prosecutor to investigate President Bush in the NSA wire-tapping scandal.

Hypocrite, thy name is Democrat.

Democrats display ignorance of federalism

With every judicial nomination, abortion is always one of the key questions: does the nominee support Roe v. Wade? With Supreme Court nominees, and the current Alito nomination is no exception, the Democrats inevitably home in on the question of whether the nominee would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?

Suggestions that the nominee would vote to overturn Roe, lead groups like NOW and NARAL to bloviate that overturning Roe would lead us to a return to the days of back-alley, coathanger abortions.

This demostrates a stunning, and in my opinion, willful misunderstanding of the principle of federalism. (Perhaps, I've written this before, so if I am repeating myself I apologize.) If Roe were overturned, abortion would not become illegal overnight. The reason? Each state could decide for itself whether to keep abortion illegal. Alabama and Georgia, for example, could say, no, we don't want doctors practicing abortion in our state. California, Massachussetts and New York, on the other hand, could say, yes, we think women should have the option to abort a pregnancy.

Try as you might to find it, and despite Justice Blackmum's "reasoning", there is no right to abortion in the Constitution. So, when presented with the argument that states could decide for themselves whether to keep abortion legal, groups in favor of abortion argue that making a woman travel to a neighboring state would create an undue hardship. And it would discriminate against the poor.

I reject such arguments on two grounds. One, transportation is cheap. You can buy a bus ticket to go from one state to another for a few hundred dollars. To me, this does not present an undue hardship.

The second reason is simple: personal responsibility. In this day and age, when every grammar school child knows what a condom is, there is no reason for unwanted pregnancies. If you want an abortion, it's because you don't want a baby. Well, if you don't want a baby, practice contraception. There are many options available and they are all fairly cost-effective.

If Democrats a feel like abortion is such a fundamental right, then why do they think, as Bill Clinton once said, it should be "safe, legal and rare". If there is nothing wrong morally with abortion, then why should it be rare?

Some thoughts on the insurgency

I received a CNN Alert yesterday about car bombing in Iraq and a thought occurred to me.

Think of the current insurgency in Iraq as an argument. One side would like to see some sort of federalist, republican government, while the other would like to see Islam and sharia as the basis for organizing and governing society.

One side is organizing into political parties so that they can persuade the rest of their countrymen to govern Iraq and spend Iraq's limited resources (remember your basic civics - every country has limited resources and politics is the non-violent method by which people decide to allocate those resources) the way their party would like. This is representative government.

The other side is sneaking about, planting bombs on roads and in public places and blowing up their countrymen so that they will be cowed into accepting Islam and sharia as the basis for organizing society.

Hasn't one side implicitly given up on persuasion and resorted to coercion? In other words, haven't the insurgents already lost this argument?

Who are the uniters and who are the dividers?

Democrats love to ridicule for George Bush for not being the "uniter" he promised to be during his campaign and upon taking office. So, let's examine the comments commemorating MLK Day by George Bush versus those of Hilary Clinton.

Here's what the president said at the "Let Freedom Ring" ceremony at the Kennedy Center on Monday:

At the dawn of this new century, America can be proud of the progress we have made toward equality, but we all must recognize we have more to do. The reason to honor Martin Luther King is to remember his strength of character and his leadership, but also to remember the remaining work. The reason to honor Mrs. Parks is not only to pay homage to her strength of character, but to remember the ideal of active citizenship. Active citizens in the 1960s struggled hard to convince Congress to pass civil rights legislation that ensured the rights of all, including the right to vote. And Congress must renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Now, let's compare that to some of the comments mady by Hillary Clinton in a speech she gave in Houston. She said the Bush administration was one of the worst "in history" (boy, she really has a short memory). She likened the House of Representatives to a plantation. The she apologized to a group of Hurricane Katrina surivors "on behalf of a government that left you behind, that turned its back on you". (I have serious questions about her competency. She obviously doesn't realize that the federal government isn't obligated to do anything to assist states that are victims of natural disasters.)

Now, I put it to you, dear reader. Just who is the uniter and who is the divider? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way.)